Back in the day, way back - Maya reps came to the office to pitch us on switching over from Max to Maya. This was early 2000s before Autodesk did the thing.
I told them, to their faces, that we use Max because artists came to us already knowing it BECAUSE it was easy to pirate.
They made a big scene, insisting that Maya was easy to pirate too!
I have literally no proof of this but I still feel in my soul it's true.